


all the rooms of the castle

by Lirazel



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-22
Updated: 2014-11-22
Packaged: 2018-02-26 13:27:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2653616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lirazel/pseuds/Lirazel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“You want them both?  God, you’re so fucking greedy,” he says.</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>  <i>“Like you aren’t?”</i></p><p> </p><p>The Adam/Blue/Gansey/Ronan(/Noah) fic you knew was coming.  Maggie Stiefvater said that polyamory was not the answer, but she’s clearly wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all the rooms of the castle

_Let's_  
_say you're still completely in the dark but we love you anyway. We_  
_love you. We really do._

—

It starts with Ronan noticing Blue.

Not in the way Blue notices Gansey, not in the way Ronan notices Adam, not even the way Ronan notices Blue noticing Gansey or the way Blue notices Ronan noticing Adam (and Gansey. Only sometimes. And up until now, Blue hasn’t acknowledged that last except with an arch of an eyebrow that sends Ronan off to break the speed limit). This time, Ronan is noticing Blue noticing Adam, and if that’s not a circlefuck Ronan doesn’t know what is.

It pisses him off, anger burning alcohol-bright through his veins, the first time he notices her eyes resting on Adam. She doesn’t look at Adam the way she does Gansey, all starry-eyed. There’s something solemn about the way she looks at Adam, but intentional. She couldn’t stop looking at Gansey if she tried, but she chooses to look at Adam, and _how fucking dare she?_

Ronan positions himself so that he can catch her eye once she’s done looking her fill, and he launches one of his knife-sharp glares at her. A flush rises high on her cheeks, but she doesn’t look away: he hasn’t been able to force her to break eye contact for as long as they’ve known each other, which isn’t something he can say about most people.

It’s not fair to blame her for looking when he can’t keep his eyes off Adam either, but Ronan doesn’t give a fuck about fair. She relinquished any rights to Adam months ago, and how fucking dare she study the way he holds himself these days, how fucking dare she notice that he doesn’t drop his chin and curl into himself anymore, that he actually meets people’s eyes now. He was irresistible to Ronan when he was half-broken and riddled with insecurity, but now he stands straighter day by day. 

And Blue looks. And she keeps looking, no matter how much Ronan scowls at her. And he can’t let that go.

He’s waiting for her when she gets to Monmouth one afternoon, crouched in the shadows by the door to the stairs, and he rises to his foot after she climbs off her bike. But Blue’s been short her whole life, and people who use their height to loom over her don’t faze her at all. She crosses her arms and stops in front of him, waiting.

Ronan isn’t one for segues, and there’s no point playing around with Blue anyway, so he just says it, right out: “Stop looking at Adam.”

The skin around her eyes tenses, but other than that, she doesn’t react. “I don’t really think it’s any of your business who I look at, Lynch.”

The words sting, a little bit. She should look ridiculous, so tiny, intentionally spiky hair, a dress like a crocheted pink loofa, but Blue has a presence about her, and her look suits her. She looks like Blue Sargent should look.

“You rejected him.” _He’s not yours. He may not be mine, but he’s not yours._ “You wouldn’t even fucking kiss him, even when you both knew you could, even after you dumped him.”

Blue looks startled that he knows, which just irritates him further since she should know by now that Noah makes secrets impossible, even if what went down between Blue and Adam hadn’t been painfully obvious to anyone who bothered to pay attention. “You didn’t want him when he was broken to pieces but now that he’s put himself back together again, you can’t resist him, can you?”

He can’t tell if the spark that flares up in her eyes is defiant or annoyed. “Do you really not get it? I couldn’t then! I _couldn’t_.”

“Didn’t want to, you mean.”

“No. _Couldn’t_.” She takes a step closer, eyes clashing with his, then looks away. “The way he looked at me—it was terrifying. It was like he was dying and I was the only one who could save him. He wanted me to fix him. I didn’t want that kind of responsibility!”

“So you left him alone to die.”

“No! I knew I couldn’t fix it so I stepped back. What he needed—what he thought he could get from me—I couldn’t give him that. Nobody could have. And if I’d tried, I would have lost myself in the process.”

 _Lost herself in the process._ God, she and Adam are more alike than they know.

She sets her chin and he can tell she means it when she says, “He had to do it himself and he did.”

Ronan would snort, but he can’t be bothered, not when he keeps clenching and unclenching his fists with anger. “And now that he’s figured out how to be strong, he’s worth the effort.”

“No.” The way she looks at him reminds him suddenly of her pink switchblade. “Now that he’s figured out he was strong all along, we can be on equal footing.”

“That’s why?”

Blue shrugs. 

He lets his lip curl up in a leer. “But Gansey—”

She cuts him off before he can say anything. “Gansey didn’t need me, no more than he needs you and Adam. He wasn’t asking me to save him.”

“Responsibility,” Ronan scoffs.

“That’s right. It wasn’t mine to take on. I would have hurt him more.” 

Ronan is the master of sneers. “That and you could barely drag your eyes off of Gansey for long enough to notice anyone else’s existence.”

“I don’t think you’re one to be saying anything about looking at Gansey.”

Ronan is used to people joking about that: not just Kavinsky, but a bunch of the guys at school have made not-so-veiled remarks about Ronan’s relationship with Gansey. Half of them don’t bother to call him by his name, probably because he shares it with two others; instead they just refer to him as Gansey’s bitch, and he doesn’t care because Gansey clearly doesn’t.

But this is different. Blue is serious, and there’s a challenge in her eyes, as insistent as Kavinsky revving his engine, and Ronan doesn’t back down from a challenge. Except when Gansey asks him to.

“You want them both? God, you’re so fucking greedy,” he says, and maybe his voice is a bit more raw than it should be.

“Like you aren’t?”

They stand there, a fall breeze swirling around them, eyes clashing, for a long moment. Then Ronan curses under his breath and storms off over to the BMW, ripping the door open and throwing himself inside.

There’s no one to race anymore, so he tries to outrun the heat flaring inside him. He’s pretty sure even a car out of his own dreams couldn’t go fast enough to manage that.

—

And finally Adam notices Ronan. And then he notices Ronan noticing Gansey, and it gets even more complicated.

“Was I your second choice?”

Ronan knows instinctively what Adam means, and his heart lurches. Adam of a few months ago wouldn’t have asked that: he would have just assumed he was and let that knowledge curdle inside him. But this Adam asks it calmly, running a finger along the tangling vines of Ronan’s tattoo, and Ronan presses his face against Adam’s bare chest and shivers.

“No.”

“No?” Adam’s tone doesn’t necessarily say he thinks Ronan is lying, but he does sound surprised.

“You’re not a fallback, Parrish,” Ronan says, rubbing with his thumb at the skin pulled taut over one of Adam’s ribs. He wishes Adam would eat more. 

“But if Gansey had looked at you that way, you never would have bothered looking at me, right?” It’s a matter of fact question, and Ronan isn’t sure when Adam became this person: self-contained and not a quarter as vulnerable as he used to be. It should maybe chill Ronan, hearing Adam say this, but it doesn’t sound like an accusation. 

“I look at you both,” Ronan says, the muscles of his back twitching under the teasing touch of Adam’s finger. “Even if he—” Ronan isn’t one for tripping over his own words, but this is Adam and they’re in his bed in his little room under the eaves at St. Agnes’ and their clothes are lying in a tangle on the floor and it’s _Adam_. “I’d always—I’d always look at you both.”

Adam makes a small hum that rumbles through his chest, and Ronan feels it against his cheek. 

“Blue looks at us both, too.”

Ronan goes still, a snake backed into a corner. But Adam keeps talking, voice as matter-of-fact as before. “She didn’t look at me at all, for a long time. But now she does, and it’s different than it was at the start. I should ask her what’s changed,” he adds absently.

 _You’re what’s changed_ , Ronan could say, thinking about that conversation outside Monmouth a few weeks before. But he suspects Adam already knows. 

“I was a mess, before,” Adam says, confirming Ronan’s thoughts, and again, his voice is completely lacking in judgment, but it makes Ronan’s chest ache. “It hurt, when she pulled away from me, but I understand it now. I was a mess.”

“Bullshit,” Ronan says, and then his back arches when Adam’s tracing finger finds its way up the line of his neck and up over his shaved head.

“It’s true. And I thought that if she wanted me, if she chose me, that would mean something. It would say something about me, about my worth.”

There’s a smell of engine grease that clings to Adam’s skin, and each breath of it hits Ronan harder than Kavinsky’s pills. “It’s fucking garbage, the way you talk about yourself.”

“That wasn’t fair to her. She tried to choose me, and she couldn’t. I don’t blame her for that, not anymore.” His voice is wise and unfathomable as Cabeswater, and Ronan wonders just what Cabeswater knows about all of them, what it tells to Adam. “She could choose me now, only there’s Gansey. But she still looks. She looks at you sometimes, too.”

Ronan snorts, and the air makes a small patch of goosebumps break out on Adam’s skin. “No she doesn’t.”

“Not often, but she does. Since we came back from underground.”

Ronan remembers hugging her right before the darkness overtook him. She was tiny against him, and not soft like he’d thought girls were. She had hugged him and not held anything back. It had surprised him and seemed natural all at once.

“So what are you saying?” Ronan demands, finally raising his head. Adam’s eyes are steady and bottomless.

“Nothing at all. Yet.”

—

Gansey, of course, doesn’t notice a damn thing. 

He blinks when he finds Ronan and Adam together, then blinks again. “Oh,” he says, voice strange. “Right. Of course.” And then he turns around and walks away from Ronan’s door.

There’s a red mark peeping just above the collar of Adam’s shirt when he pauses by the door to the stairs later. Ronan is still sprawled out on his bed, and he can only see one sleeve of Adam’s shirt through the crack of the door, but he knows the mark is there. Knows that even Gansey can’t fail to see it this time. The floor creaks a little as Adam stops beside the door. 

“You know he’s still yours,” Adam says, with that preternatural calm. “And I am too.”

Ronan’s alone, so he lets his face wrinkle up in a grin at the choking sound Gansey makes, at the nonsense he says as he fumbles for words. But the door bangs shut behind Adam before Gansey can get out anything coherent, and Ronan flips over onto his stomach and presses his face into the pillow that smells like Adam and laughs.

—

Noah notices everything, and it’s long since stopped surprising Ronan.

Gansey’s jumpy over the next few days, and Ronan and Noah take full advantage of it. One afternoon they end up sitting on the roof, legs dangling, laughing, as they watch Gansey flee to his Camaro. They’re too far up to see the flush of his cheeks, but Ronan knows it’s there. Gansey is just too easy to tease sometimes.

“You wouldn’t leave me out, would you?” Noah’s words are sudden, abrupt, and they dry up Ronan’s laughter. Ronan looks over at him curiously.

“Can you? Would you want to?”

Noah tilts his head, considering. He looks like a puppy when he does that. “Not everything. But—I kissed Blue, you know. I liked it.” 

Ronan knows. Noah told him this before.

“You’re always cold,” Ronan says after a second. “We’d have to get a hot water bottle to keep the bed from icing over.”

Noah grins, lopsided under the smudge on his face, and Ronan leans over and ruffles his hair.

—

Even with all the hints, Gansey still doesn’t notice. Ronan suspects that he doesn’t _let_ himself notice, that he crumples up the thought and tries to throw it away, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t have it. 

“You can’t pretend like our relationships are like other people’s,” Adam says in what Ronan has taken to calling his magician voice: unruffled as a mirror-smooth pond. As the water in a scrying bowl before the scrying happens. “Maybe it’s Glendower and Cabeswater, maybe it’s just who we’d be no matter what. But we aren’t the same.”

“Uh—okay?” Gansey keeps staring at them, Ronan and Adam and Blue all sitting on his bed like they belong there. Adam hadn’t told Ronan anything, but he’d given him a look as they walked over to Monmouth. Ronan hadn’t said anything to Blue, but when Adam motioned to the empty space on the bed, she’d walked purposefully over and sat down like she’d been waiting for her cue all along. And when Gansey walked out of the bathroom-cum-kitchen, he’d started coughing at the sight of the three of them waiting for him. 

The rest of them, though, are surprisingly calm. Well, Adam’s calm, and Blue seems to be, too, though they haven’t ever talked about this since that day in the parking lot when they argued. Ronan just gnaws at the leather of his wristband, but inside, something is sparking.

“There’s no point in holding back,” Adam continues. “Not when we all love each other.”

He says it like he’d say, _There’s no point planning a picnic, not when it’s going to rain tomorrow_. Gansey jumps, and looks away, ears red, but his eyes come sliding back, like he can’t look away for long no matter how hard he tries.

“We all—we all love each other?” Gansey’s voice is so close to squeaky that Ronan has to smirk. 

“Well, I’m not sure about these two.” Adam looks from Ronan to Blue. Ronan looks at Blue. Blue looks at Ronan. There’s a standoff, because that’s what they do. But then Blue rolls her eyes and her mouth creases like she’s trying to keep from smiling, and Ronan snorts and goes back to chewing on his wristbands.

Gansey, for once, stops playing obtuse. His face is very pale, but his ears are still very red. “How would it even—how could we—we’d end up hurting each other!” Ronan knows he isn’t talking about physical pain.

Adam shrugs. “We do that anyway. And most of it wouldn’t be hurt.”

Something flickers in Gansey’s eyes, and Ronan knows that there might be more protestations coming, but in the end, they’ll win. 

—

“That was extremely awkward,” Blue says afterwards. Ronan can see her fingers tangled in Gansey’s hair. 

“But good,” Ronan grunts because if he doesn’t say it, Adam will say it in that untouchable way of his, and there’s no room for that when the sheets are torn halfway off Gansey’s bed.

“Yes. But good.” Blue presses her cheek against Adam’s thigh and smiles at Ronan, a smile like a switchblade. He flicks out his own knife smile in return.

Gansey, meanwhile, has his face buried in his pillow and is making some sort of keening noise. Adam jabs him in the ribs with a long finger. “Are you trying to suffocate yourself?”

Gansey raises his head after a moment. His hair is messy, falling in swoops over his forehead and obscuring one eye, giving him a rakish look that’s belied by the flush of his cheeks. “I didn’t—I never thought I could—”

“Never thought you could do that with your mouth?” Ronan says, arching a brow. “Because I could have told since the first day we met that you could.”

Blue stabs an extremely bony elbow into Ronan’s arm and Gansey makes another embarrassed noise. 

“I never thought I could have you all!”

The words pop out of Gansey’s mouth and then a second later he blinks in surprise, then stuffs his head back under the pillow. And Ronan notices for the first time that Blue’s light laughter makes a nice counterpoint to his rumbling chuckles.

“I could have told you.”

Four heads turn, and there’s Noah standing by the edge of the bed. He still has on his Aglionby uniform; Ronan suspects he wouldn’t be able to take it off even if he tried. “My turn,” Noah says, and then he clambers over Ronan, a knee ending up in Ronan’s ribs, and flops himself down between Ronan and Blue, his limbs falling on top of the tangle of them in the middle of the bed. There’s more the suggestion of the fabric of his khakis, the wool of his sweater against Ronan’s bare skin, but there’s something comforting about it, like the presence of a cat who won’t let you pet him but doesn’t leave the room.

“You haven’t kissed me in a long time,” Noah says, sounding a bit mournful. 

“I’m sorry, Noah,” Blue says, and she smiles as she kisses him. Ronan looks at Gansey, and he sees something wistful in Gansey’s eyes, but then Gansey shakes his head and tightens his arm around Adam’s waist, a smile curving his lips. If Ronan weren’t so tired, he’d lean over and kiss him.

There’s a thump on his chest. “My turn!” Noah says, and Ronan laughs as Noah dives down to his mouth. The kiss is cold, like Ronan had known it would be, but he likes it, and he pats Noah’s hair and then gives the back of his neck a squeeze.

There’s some squirming after that, probably Noah trying to kiss Gansey and Adam, and then Noah’s curled back up against Ronan’s side again, his hand clasping Blue’s. He lets out a little sigh of contentment.

“Took you long enough,” Noah says, and Ronan has to laugh.


End file.
